After nearly 30 years in Alaska, after decades kayaking
coastlines replete with tidewater glaciers and hiking mountains up to vast
icefields, I thought I knew ice. But
that’s the wonderment of the natural world: it continues to surprise me. So when I traveled to the Antarctic Peninsula
in February, I saw ice as I never had before.
Endless forms most beautiful, wrote Charles Darwin, and so it is,
perhaps nowhere more evident than with ice. Yes, he was writing about biological
evolution. But there is, in these giant ancient-ice bergs, an evolution as well. And an unsurpassed artistry.
Once they break from the icesheet or glacier of the
continent, they live for years, decades. These bergs are so big they are named and tracked, watched by satellite. B9 sheered from the eastern Ross Ice Shelf in 1987; in 1989, it broke into three pieces; in 2010, the largest piece, B9B, collided with the Mertz Glacier, causing it to calve a massive berg.
And they travel. By current and wind they travel hundreds of miles, circling the continent, moving northward. B9 covered 1200 miles in 22 months. One berg blocked our route through the Lemaire Channel one day, but by the next had shifted, allowing passage.
Not until this trip had I truly seen an
iceberg. Growlers and bergy bits, yes, and floes. But not bergs. They are a different animal
entirely. Freed from the icecap
or glacier, they wander the coasts and ocean for decades, their faces
changing, their bodies eroding and falling apart, until nothing is left
but shards like bones.
They are not just white, but a changing tapestry of all colors,
swirling in dark seas. Their ice is blue and pink and yellow,
purple in dark light, and sometimes struck gold, shining like diamonds. Like
the white of a color wheel, it contains all other colors, and reveals one or
another or several at any given moment, in any given light and shadow, any alteration
in perspective. A changing, moving work of art.
Watching the beauty before me, the constantly changing kaleidoscope of color and texture, never far from my mind was climate change. The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming
places in the world. Ice shelves are collapsing, glaciers and ice caps are
retreating and thinning. There’s news this month of the catastrophic collapse
of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds 10 percent of the continent’s ice.
The beauty and the terror of life on Earth right now. Species like Adelie penguins who nest on ice having to move farther south,
away from us. The grief of what we are destroying, the joy of what remains. The beauty and the terror: not of getting trapped in the ice,
but of losing the ice, the great melt underway.
There is an absence here, an absence of human presense, like a fresh breeze through an open window in a room that has been closed
for centuries. It is a place to rest worry and fear, to see by the light of a new path, a new way of living on this planet. There is a lack of thinking that there is
anything here for us to do, other than witness.
I still dream of moving through the ice gallery, a gallery of sculptures by
elemental forces. Nature doesn’t cling to her creations, said one of my companions. It's like a sand
mandala, he said, the beauty formed, and then swept away. Beauty, on a different time scale than ours. More slowly, gradually, at least from our perspective. Geologic time. Earth
time.
